Theory of Everything
by Harlequin Sequins
Summary: I can't take listening to you breathe anymore. Liebgott-angst.


**disclaimer - I don't own Band of Brothers and this is in no way meant to disrespect the memory of the real Joe Liebgott. This is based on his fictional portrayal in the mini-series.**

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God, you smell so beautiful when you're undone. With your eyes twisting their hands of need into the back of your skull. Doesn't it hurt so good, baby? Your body is empty. Every once closed-off chasm now belongs to me. You've engraved me into their oblivion, made alive what was once such permanent death of feeling that the transition is gouging the air out of your body. There is no more room for you. Only room for me.

But I want you to come to me softly. This hardness is molding sharp contours into my skin, the coils of blood boiling mad and bones orchestrating trembles throughout their melting marrows. You're making it want to break too fast, too quickly. My body falls to its knees to your conquering hands. And when shall I fill your emptiness? With a kiss to your brow, I remind you. This isn't about you. It isn't about me. It's about what's _fair_.

What you don't know, little dove, little doe, is that I will fill with more than just the release of a nice good fuck. A job well done. In the end, when you leave this place, you will be carried away into the searching arms of my pain. My plea for resurrection, for haven, for anything that feels human at all. It's the kind that makes the history books thick and pretty for the ages to recall, such honor and glory, behold America the great!

What about me?

What about the men that lost their lives and still search for them in an afterlife they weren't ready for? My people. Their corpses fall apart in the mouths of the worms. The crust of the earth keeps them. There is no saying sorry, no healing half-sewn wounds. Just a fucking please, forgive us, and that's all they get for everything they've seen.

You're so innocent, little cunt. Little fucking temptress. You're so fucking innocent, aren't you? You've never tasted the air peppered with your own insides trying to escape manmade holes. You've never been rocked into forced eternal slumber by the lullabies of the falling sky, the falling trees, everything is fucking falling. You weren't there. All you know how to do is sigh and call for me, my name, but it doesn't even stick to your tongue. You swallow it whole. Like you swallow the name of every soulless vessel that fills you with their own pain. How could you know any better? They appear human to your eyes.

And you don't even know how many shards of man you keep in the broken reflection of yourself. Trying to fix what you've lost long ago. There is no going the fuck backwards. No retracing steps to make sure you did things right the first time, the second, god, there isn't even a wish to be spared for a _third. _

All we get is one. One life. One lifetime's supply of breaths to take. One body to make full with beautiful memories.

But me. I'm full. Not with beauty. Not with memory. With the callus of war.

If I think real hard on it, and if the night is quiet enough, I can feel the sound of my own heart beating toward internal death. Another day, another step in time with the _agony _of knowing you're already dead and your body is just holding on. Hoping it's all a dream. Pleading with a God whose name you've called so many times its become clockwork, gears sticking as the oils that keep them moving run dry – there is no God, is there?

I ask myself all the time, darling. _Baby. _You're so innocent, aren't you? You still think there's a God.

When you think of angels, you don't think of saints with red crosses on their arms and the silent white of calling you back into the snow, tearing you from the arms of the next world over. When you think of God's healing hands, you don't think of pin-prick fingers of morphine, the sacred numbness that pulls over you a veil that knows nothing of the throes. Of split-open skin. And Hell? Hell is just a place to store the evil of this world when its torn away and all that is left is the afterthought of God's great plan.

I'd love to tell you that you're so fucking wrong. Have the pleasure of telling you that damnation is being alive, it is wide awake inside of you. That Hell is living. I've done nothing in this life to deserve conviction, but this is my sentence. This is the final verdict. I'm a damned soul walking on the wrong side. If Hell is really out there, then why am I still here?

You're slick against my touch. It's better this way. If I melt into you, you might burn. You're just a child, aren't you? A child wrapped in a woman's misleading body. Swells of breasts and caverns of intimate pleasure are only a fronting image for you. Behind that face that sinks down into the depths that candlelight cannot reach, a little girl lies in wait for you to realize she's still there.

Why are you wasting your fucking time with me? I've lost the little boy. He died the first time I watched the life go out of a man's eyes.

I slide down your throat in nothing more than a whisper and I can't take listening to you breathe anymore.

You're screaming at me, _good for nothing bastard you are Joe Liebgott!_, but baby, I was out the door before you even came for me, crying out my name into the ceiling in desperate supplication as if it will help you understand the true depths of human emotion.

But you just don't _fucking _get it do you? After all that pain I filled you up with? The sorrows that I've never spoken aloud, they beat inside you now, like a child of testimony. And look at you. You could give less of a fuck. But how could you ever understand? You're just a little girl wearing a grown woman's body.

The pain's still there as I leave that little hole in the world in which I told you a story, in which I translated into physical gain and pleasure for you. But I never told you, little tramp, little worthless piece of trash, that no matter how many times I try to release my pain into your body, into the next woman, into the next…it 's always there. I can't escape. I am spilling over with the memory of the days I spent crushed into the grain of war.

And somewhere, in the darkness of the earth, there will be understanding. It will open its arms wide and relieve this body of its aching burden. Not like you, fucking dove. _Fucking doll. _

The hearts of Easy still beat somewhere. I will follow the cadence home.


End file.
